作者: Michelle Phillips

This is not a conventional biography. I rely not on documents, but almost exclusively on recorded interviews and memories of Michael Foot constituting a raw record of conversations not smoothed over by a biographical narrative. This is a book about process. I show how I went about obtaining my story, which ostensibly concerned Jill Craigie, who married Michael Foot in 1949. Michael entered Jill’s life in 1945. He was such an important source for this biography that, inevitably, I learned as much about him as about her. Readers come to biographies to learn about the subject, not the biographer. Yet the biographer is, in a sense, half the story. Or, as Paul Murray Kendall put it in “The Art of Biography”, every biography is an autobiography. So “A Private Life of Michael Foot” is an effort to show how a biographer struggles to tell his own story, even as family and friends cherish differing narratives about that same subject. My wish is to highlight these clashes of perception rather than reconcile their discrepancies.There is value, too, in showing the rough edges of biography, the stops and starts, in an unapologetic fashion. I wonder if there has ever been a biography that has treated a British political and literary figure in quite so revealing a fashion.